


The Heirs

by basilique



Category: The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: Bookworm Rue, Multi, Musician Peeta, Musician Thresh, Native American Gale, Native American Katniss, POV First Person, Pack Family, Post-Apocalypse, Survival, Teen Angst, Teen Romance, Teenage Rue, Teenagers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-05
Updated: 2017-05-27
Packaged: 2018-08-19 15:08:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8213612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/basilique/pseuds/basilique
Summary: I don’t have any friends left over from my childhood, and I don’t have any friends with any childhood left in them. I like it that way. It was a clean cut. It made a clean line. When you break a bone, it heals stronger. When a person is stripped of everything she knows, her skin gets thicker.





	1. Chapter 1

I don’t have any childhood friends. The friends that I have and me, we found each other after the bombs. We shared our childhoods by talking. All I know is the stories they’ve told me. 

I had Gale, on the Res. That’s the Passamaquoddy Reservation, where he and I grew up. But we grew apart; I got insecure, he got popular. 

I wasn’t likeable, and I wasn’t pretty, and everybody knew it. I’d go to parties with my new “friends”, and they would drink and dance and talk and make _more_ friends. And I would sortof stand there and drink and just try to act like a normal person. I’d try so hard to be fake right back at the fake people who said they really liked me. 

Nobody could afford to be fake now, though. You’ve got to be really honest now, and really straight-forward. You’ve got to tell people what you can and can’t handle. You’ve gotta tell people what you need. If you’re feeling sick, even the slightest little sniffle, you tell the group. If you get a bad feeling about somebody, you get your group away from them as fast as you can. If you have to take a piss in the middle of the night, you wake up a buddy and make sure they know where you’re going and how long you’ll be in case you don’t come back. Secrets are a thing of the past. After so much fakeness, though, I can’t say I miss them. 

I don’t have any friends left over from my childhood, and I don’t have any friends with any childhood left in them. I like it that way. It was a clean cut. It made a clean line. When you break a bone, it heals stronger. When a person is stripped of everything she knows, her skin gets thicker. 

So it’s been one year, today. One year since I found myself living on the streets of Maine’s only city, one year since I first slept in an alleyway. It’s also been exactly one year since Rue turned sixteen. 

She stirs beside me. She mutters something. She always talks in her sleep. I like it when the words come out of her mouth in different languages. To tell you the truth, I like it when any words come out of her mouth. Whether she is asleep or awake, I love to hear Rue speak. Maybe that’s because I remember the first words I heard her say. It was on my first day at District Thirteen High School. 

“Hey, you’re new, right? What’s your name?” 

“Katniss.” 

“Hi. I’m Rue.” 

She shook my hand and smiled at me. I was amazed. I couldn’t think of the last time I had shook hands with someone my age. At my old school, we usually didn’t acknowledge that people were new. And if the teachers put us through some awkward introduction, we just sortof halfheartedly muttered, “hey”. 

“Do you want to eat with me and my friends?” 

I looked at her incredulously. This was at the beginning of my Sophomore year, and I had never been asked that question before. The question was so childish, but so grown-up at the same time. How could she be so brave? So unafraid of looking dumb? What if I said no? _How would she live with herself?_ But I didn’t say no. I was awed by this sweet, brave girl. 

“Yeah. That’d be great.” 

She led me over to the place where they were sitting on the carpeted floor. There were no lunch tables. People were wandering between groups like there were no distinctions. 

Almost as crazy as Rue and her friends. They were just a step ahead of me, I’ve realized now. They were something like enlightened. They talked to each other with sincerity and respect, and they talked about what they were learning in school with real interest. They asked me about myself. I got all tongue-tied when I spoke. There was no way I could articulate like them. There was no way I could have anything to say that would seem important to them. But they really listened to me, and when I stumbled over my words, they didn’t even smirk. 

There’s this thing my calculus teacher at that school told me. He said that knowledge can be represented by three circles around each other. The middle one is the circle of what you know. Around that is the circle of what you know you don’t know. Like, for example, I know that I know nothing about the state of the world outside this city. But around those two circles, there is the circle of what you don’t know you don’t know. And that circle shrunk for me a little bit the day I met Rue. Before that I was pretty convinced that I knew what a teenager was. But when I met these kids, I realized that I had never actually known what a teenager could be. Now, Rue is like the sister I never had. 

I roll over in my sleeping bag, prop myself-up on one arm, and reach out for my briefcase. It’s my mother’s old nursing briefcase, where she used to keep her medical equipment. It’s kinda beat-up by now, even though I’ve tried to keep it looking nice. My mom was really, really intense about her work stuff. Her white briefcase was always shining clean, perfectly organized and maintained, just like the house. It used to drive me absolutely insane. But when…well, the briefcase became mine, I tried as hard as I could to keep it from so much as a scratch. Unfortunately, living the way I do, just about everything you own gets banged right up. Being anal about your briefcase is a recipe for misery. 

I open my briefcase and pull out my present for Rue. It’s a book that I found the other day when I went into a Barnes & Noble to take some fuel for a fire. It’s a bunch of essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who she really likes, for some reason. She talks about him all the time. I had picked it up to burn it and roast a squirrel, but then I realized what it was and thought of her birthday. I also made her a bookmark out of a piece of ribbon I found on the floor of the empty Joann Fabrics. I wrapped the present in my gray hoodie. 

I won’t mention to her that I was in Barnes & Noble looking for fuel, she’d get upset. Her black eyes fill with tears any time we bring-up burning books. I get where she’s coming from, but you just can’t eat squirrel without cooking it, and I’d rather starve for literature than literally starve. Personally. 

“You awake, Katniss?” murmers Thresh, lying on his back with his eyes closed in the sleeping bag next to me. 

“Yeah,” I whisper, scooting myself closer to him. Oh, yes, Thrush, I am awake. I’ve been awake for a good hour, my mind spinning in circles. I probably slept four hours total, and not for lack of trying. “Don’t be too loud. We should get breakfast before Rue wakes up. Surprise her.” 

“Yeah, we should,” he says, opening his sleep-heavy eyes. He flips over, and props himself up, like me. “We can’t leave them alone, though.” 

“I’ll wake Jo up.” I crawl out of my sleeping bag. It’s a bit chilly, and I’m a little sore from my restless night on the hard floor of this dingy Thai food restaurant. There’s nothing to complain about, though. It had doors that we could lock. And it had a couple of cushions in the back that we could use as pillows. We might be able to take one or two with us, if we can figure out a way to carry them. 

I crawl a few feet to the other sleeping bag, which Johanna and Rue are sharing. We have just three sleeping bags, so we sortof rotate who gets their own every night and who has to double up. I put my hand on Johanna’s shoulder, lean over, and whisper in her ear. 

“Jo. Wake up.” 

“Go away,” she growls. 

“Be quiet and wake up. Thresh and I are going to get breakfast. Don’t wake Rue up.” 

“Fine,” she grumbles. 

I look at Thresh. He nods and follows me to the door. I pull it open and Thresh and I slip out. I shut the door and it locks. They’re locked in, safe. 

On the street, Thresh instantly becomes a different person. He sets his feet. His baby face becomes the face of a man. I know the drill with Thresh’s personas. When it’s just us, him and me and Johanna and Rue, he’s gentle and playful. We call him Song Thrush, and he loves it. But as soon as we get onto the street, he transforms into a soldier. If I was one of the street wraiths, I would be terrified of him. 

We always hold hands in public. It’s safer. Shows anyone who might be watching that we are a team, and if they want to try and rob one of us, they will have to face the other. So as the two of us take hands and set off down the sidewalk, we take hands and interlock fingers.


	2. Chapter 2

The two of us set off down the sidewalk. We always hold hands in public. It’s safer. Thresh lets go of my hand, though, after a moment and walks to my left side so that he is the one on the street side. We take hands again and interlock fingers again. 

“You’re funny,” I say. 

“Why?” 

“To bother with chivalry, in our situation.” 

“I have to keep in practice.” 

I’m pretty sure he thinks that things will get better. I think he believes he’s gonna get to go to music school and have a big career as a drummer. I think he’s wrong. I hope _I’m wrong_. The problem is, though, that things don’t just spring back after they’ve been destroyed. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but it could certainly be destroyed in one. What with the killing technology we have now, Rome could be a dust bunny in a matter of minutes. But you can’t just rebuild an economy, a government, or a system of production and trade that took hundreds of years to develop. You can’t just restore the public’s faith in a government after something…something like this. That would take far longer than our lifetimes, or our children’s, or their children’s. Thresh will never go to music school. 

But I can’t think about the collapse anymore. It makes me sick. It takes me back to the dread of that day. I get the same sensations I had then, and I’m trapped in it, like it’s happening again. The worst part is the moment when I realized what was happening. I mean, it was obvious what was happening on the surface. It’s hard to mistake a war. But when I recognized it, realized _why_ it was happening… that was something else altogether. 

I have got to stop thinking. That’s the one thing that makes me a liability to our group. I think a lot. Sometimes, at night, I can’t get to sleep for hours because I just can’t stop thinking. But I’ve gotta get it under control right now. Remembering is not gonna get us breakfast. 

The thing about living in the city is that the hunting is almost nonexistent. The animals remember the way cities used to be, full of moving traffic and loud noise. That makes it pretty hard to find food. We were just fine for the first month or two, until we ate the city clean out of everything it had. 

My group has a resource that a lot of people don’t know about, though; there was a vocational school right next to our high school. And it had a greenhouse. That is the direction in which Thresh and I set our steps. The plants are still growing, thanks to me. I was forced to learn how to garden by my aunt on the reservation. She told me that gardening, hunting, and making love were the three most important skills for a human being to have. She only taught me one of the three, for the record. I just sortof tolerated her lessons, but oh, boy, am I glad for them now. My ability to garden has saved us a lot of suffering. 

As Thresh and I step over a crack in the sidewalk, I hear music begin to play. The music of a single violin, swelling-up from the area of the railroad tracks we are approaching. 

“Peeta,” says Thresh. 

“It must be,” I say. My heart starts to speed-up a little bit. My hands start to sweat. Thresh notices this. He looks over at me and grins. 

“What?” I say defensively. 

“Oh, nothing.” 

Thresh has this way of saying a lot with only a few words. Sometimes it’s useful, like when we need to communicate fast in a bad situation. Other times, like this, it’s just irritating. 

The thing is, where Peeta is…Gale usually is too. 

They travel together, a pack of two. They compliment each other perfectly…Gale is serious, hardened, practical. And Peeta is compassionate, creative… they each fill in what the other lacks. 

We are en route to walk straight past them. I try to think straight, to be calm about this. It’s really no big deal to see Gale. It’s not. As kids, we would swim naked together in the lake near his house. I could think of him as like…a cousin or something. There’s no reason to be _nervous_ about seeing him. 

We pass a tall bush that was hiding them from our sight. All of a sudden, there they are. They’re holding court on the railroad tracks. There are about twelve people around them, sitting to listen to Peeta’s music or walking back and forth, balancing on the rails. People are drawn to the two of them. Just because Peeta’s talented and Gale’s…Gale. They swarm them wherever they go, bees to honey. It’s pathetic, really. 

Gale is sitting on his big, brown, beaten suitcase, and Peeta stands beside him with his head cocked against his electric blue violin. That violin is famous on these railroad tracks, the most beautiful surviving instrument for miles around. 

Peeta plays it masterfully, pressing it with those artists fingers. 

He’s too talented to be stuck here. He should be off in a concert hall somewhere. He should have a family to watch him in the audience. He’s too sweet to be without a family. 

Thresh I step onto the train tracks and Gale looks up at us, surprised. He looks right at me. I smile automatically, and something about his eyes tells me to stay. I stop, rooted to the tracks. If an old train was somehow powered-up and came along at this moment, I would be driven into the tracks, because I am not moving. 

Thresh stops when I stop, and we stand together and listen. Though I can’t take my eyes off Gale, I can sense Thresh closing his eyes, in the thrall of the music. He used to live with his headphones on. He even wore them in class. His charger was at home on the day everything changed, so he only had a few more hours left of music before his ipod died. He still carries it around with him, hoping he might find a way to charge it. Sometimes he wears the earbuds at night as he falls asleep, pretending to hear his music. Real music, like this, is candy to Thresh. The two of us could stand here forever and listen to Peeta, albeit for different reasons. 

Nobody wants to talk over the music of the violin, so we wait another minute, until Peeta stops playing and lowers the violin. 

“Hey Katniss,” he says brightly, as the people around him applaud. “Hey Thresh.” 

“Hey,” I say distractedly. Gale is standing up, and he is looking at me again. 

He is so striking. Tall, dark, and restless looking. I’d nearly forgotten about it from the last time I saw him, but he has a tattoo on his right bicep. A jet black drop; a drop of petroleum oil. 

Lots of people have followed Gale and gotten the same tattoo. 

It makes sense; people get things that have defined them tattooed on their bodies. We might as well have the black drop tattooed across the city; oil is what built it up, and what destroyed it. 

I’d like to get the tattoo one day. I’ll wait until a few more people get it before I do, though. I wouldn’t want Gale to think I’m obsessed with him, or something. 

“Where are you two headed so early?” Peeta asks us. 

My mouth feels all soft and wet and warm, like the vibrations from the music stirred-up the water in me, and I have the ominous feeling that I will drool all over myself if I open my mouth. I swallow hard. 

“It’s Rue’s birthday,” I manage to say. “We’re going to find her breakfast.” 

I cringe on the inside. _What a stupid thing to say…_

“Do you need any help?” Gale asks, looking straight at me. 

I find that I cannot speak. 

“No, we’re good, thanks,” says Thresh politely. 

“Okay. See you guys later then.” Gale smiles at us. 

Thresh nods. 

“Bye,” I choke. 

We continue on toward the greenhouse. I want to stop and catch my breath, but I also want to get as much space as possible between me and Gale Hawthorne. 

“You’re funny,” Thresh says after a minute. 

“Shut up.” 

“I didn’t say it was a bad thing.” 

“Let’s focus, Thresh. Food.” 

“Right. Focus.” He is still teasing me. I elbow him, and then look off to begin the process of dissecting every moment of my exchange with Gale. I do this every time we see each other. I think about everything that was said, every move he made, and every move that I should have made while I was standing there paralyzed. 

Joanna says I think too much. She says that Rue and I both need “some kind of stupid pills” to make us process more slowly. Or less thoroughly. She’s right, we both do think way too much. Sometimes the two of us get into conversations that Rue has labeled “mental diarrhea”, where we just vent our thoughts, on no particular topic, for hours. She has a tendency to go on about a topic, every detail of it, until she has completely squeezed it dry, and I have a tendency to go on tangents. Our conversations could last all day. 

We’ve reached the greenhouse. It’s a long building, shaped like a half-cylinder. We slip in. I go straight for the peppers and Thresh starts pulling onions. It’s always stressful coming in here. We try to be as quick as we can. There are a few other people who use the greenhouse, we know, but it would be disaster if the street wraiths were to find this place. We would survive, but we would be hungry. Me and Thresh drop our harvest into his backpack. 

“Let’s get before Rue wakes up,” he says, swinging the pack over his shoulder.


End file.
